


Sufficient Courage

by Callmesalticidae



Series: There is Nothing (to fear) [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Hogwarts House Sorting, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drinking, Gen, Ruminations, Tom Riddle was sorted into Gryffindor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 05:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15857379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmesalticidae/pseuds/Callmesalticidae
Summary: Remus wonders where it went wrong. There is nothing to fear.





	Sufficient Courage

> “You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes." 
> 
> _Paulo Coelho_

_Maybe_ , Remus thinks,  _it all went wrong with the Sorting_. Gryffindor, House of bravery and chivalry, was already becoming Gryffindor, House of nerve and daring, home to those who sought to break the limits of ordinary wizards or break themselves in the trying.

If only Sirius had gone into Ravenclaw, as he later said the Sorting Hat had suggested, he could have had his rebellion without convincing his family that he was a lost cause. James could have followed, and the two of them would have never fallen under the influence of a boy like Caradoc Dearborn. Peter could have been placed in Hufflepuff, where he could have found place to be nurtured rather than crushed. As for himself, Remus might have been alright in Slytherin. His father’s name was of good pedigree and he himself was good at acting. He could have managed it.

Gryffindor destroyed them all.

* * *

They were all drawn into the cause for different reasons. Peter, because he followed wherever they went. Lupin, for the dream that someday he wouldn’t have to hide his condition. Sirius, to escalate the war that he’d started against the rest of his family.

James… James was many things, Lupin must admit to himself whenever he considers the past. Gracious to his friends, cruel to his enemies and in search of someone to be that enemy… James was charismatic and clever, and a braggart and a bully.

When the cards were down, Peter wasn’t the only follower. They were all, in their own way, caught up in James’ wake, and if Sirius and Remus hadn’t held their own reasons for falling in with that crowd then they would have done it just to go where James was going.

Loyalty was a Hufflepuff virtue. Perhaps it was also a Gryffindor vice.

* * *

In December of their first year, breakfast was interrupted when every sweet bun at the Slytherins’ table transformed into a rabbit. Attempts to rectify the situation were stymied until someone realized that the sweet buns had not been transfigured into rabbits at all, but that the sweet buns had been rabbits to start with and had merely turned back after the magic had been allowed to wear off. After that, it was no wonder that none of the untransfiguration spells had been working.

It was a fifth-year prefect in their House who discovered the original sweet buns in a cache under Sirius’ bed. Caradoc Dearborn handed out detentions (and docked points for the pun), then surprised them that night when he declared that their detention would be educational in nature. Their prank had not just featured a bit of complicated magic but an unorthodox thinking style, and Dearborn hated the idea that such talent might go to waste. He knew them to be upstanding young men (oh, how James preened for the next week, as if the pronouncement had made him eleven-going-on-twenty) and thought they might be interested in Doing Some Good.

Doing Good was great fun. For a while it just meant repeating some slogans in-between hexing Slytherins and pranking everyone, but somewhere along the line it became deadly serious. Dearborn graduated at the end of their third year, and by that time it was an article of faith in most of Gryffindor that their headmaster had only confronted Grindelwald because he knew that Tom Riddle was going to graduate the next year and beat him to it. That, too, had started out as a joke, but the question, once asked, would not go away: Why was it that Dumbledore had waited so long to fight Grindelwald? Not even the Ravenclaws knew, so perhaps it was true that his fear of Grindelwald was only outmatched by his fear that he might be shown up by a Hogwarts graduate.

* * *

Perhaps it was true that Gryffindor destroyed Remus and ruined his friends. That didn’t mean that Remus and his friends were free from responsibility. Lily Evans had been sorted there as well, and no one had opposed Riddle more fiercely in Gryffindor than she did, arguing about Stalin and Mao and muggle revolutions that had gone sour, as if muggles had anything to do with the Wizarding World. For a little while it did seem like she might turn the tide against Riddle’s influence in their House, but then she graduated, and the violence spilled out onto into Diagon Alley and the streets of Hogsmeade, and not even Lily could pursue a charms mastership and fight a war at the same time.

There came a point when he realized that Lily had disappeared, but exactly when and why were things that Remus was never able to figure out. He likes to think that she’s drinking iced teas on Bondi Beach right now with Severus Snape, enjoying the Australian sun and and never giving any thought to Britain or its affairs.

Remus knows better, though. Lily was a fighter, not a runner. If she’s gone and not just dead, if she’s in Australia or Canada or even Germany, then it’s only so that she can bide her time.

“How is it that I’m the only one between us who cares about your rights?” James once snapped at her.

“I don’t recall asking you to fight my battles,” was her only reply.

Maybe Gryffindor destroyed her too, or maybe she was the only one who really deserved her place in that House.

* * *

Talentless, everyone had called Peter, but that wasn’t true at all. He had become an animagus, hadn’t he? One could only get so far down that road while holding another’s hand. No, Peter was clever enough, just with the misfortune to be placed beside candles that burned so much more brightly than himself. The worst thing of all that is Peter believed it too. Nobody expected much out of Peter, neither mother nor teachers nor closest friends, so nobody is exactly who Peter became.

Remus and Peter meet for firewhiskies every Hogsmeade weekend, and every Friday in the summer months. Sirius came too, once upon a time, but then Remus and Peter drank harder than was healthy. When they stopped inviting him, it was clear that Sirius neither knew nor cared whether their get-togethers were going on without him or had ceased altogether.

They drink and talk about their jobs, about Remus’ teaching position and whatever it is that Peter is doing this month, stage crew in the Diagonal Theatre or server at the Hog’s Head or a collector for Borgin and Burke’s. For a few months there had been a gig with Mundungus Fletcher, fencing goods and smuggling Continental contraband, but then Fletcher was thrown in Azkaban and only Peter’s wits saved him from the same fate.

There it was again: cunning Peter, quick-on-his-feet Peter. Shattered Peter, who didn’t seem to think he was capable of, or even deserved, the sort of life that Remus had.

Peter would have been better off in Hufflepuff. Even in Slytherin he might have found real friends, or at least people who could have seen something useful in him and cultivated it, rather than treated him like an audience from whom only applause could be expected.

They talk about James, they talk about Sirius, they wonder how it all went wrong and how to live with the choices that they made. Remus wonders how the Lestranges would have fared, had he and Sirius been there to stand beside the Potters. Peter only cries and, every so often, makes a toast in the name of a better tomorrow.

“You wouldn’t have been able to do a thing,” Peter told him one time, and it’s all that Remus can do to not lash out and inform Peter that they are not all as useless as Peter thinks himself to be. “This is how Peter copes,” Remus said to the open air when he left that night, and then he felt ashamed for his part in making Peter the man that he was.

* * *

The fate of the Potter family weighs heavily on Remus, even as part of him rebels against a word like “fate.” It may be that Peter is right and Remus couldn’t have changed it, but he prefers to live in a world where he has agency and it’s meaningful to think about the world as it might have been.

What if he and Sirius had been at the Potters’ that night? What if none of them had been sorted into Gryffindor? What if he had slept over at a friend’s, the night that Fenrir Greyback came?

They started talking seriously about it, about getting their Marks, in sixth year. Or rather, James and Sirius did. Remus couldn’t bear it. Peter was never considered.

It was the violence that got to him. Call him soft, call him weak, call him a traitor to the cause, though James never did, but it was something that Remus wasn’t able to get over. There had been raids, and no matter how hard he told himself that the people attacked had deserved it, Remus didn’t think he’d be able to lift a wand against anyone who hadn’t done so first.

Then, after their initiation, Remus had other reasons to never join. He wasn’t present to watch but there were signs by which he could tell: the suffering in their eyes when they returned, the tremble in their fingers; the way in which James and Sirius talked about that night, when they talked about it at all, as though they had witnessed something divine and been burned by the glory of it.

There are some things in the world which do not merely enlighten, but consume.

With every passing year, the culture shifted and Gryffindor House became, more and more and in all the ways that mattered, a sort of Riddle House. Students graduated, and some of those became Death Eaters, and a few of those were swallowed up in the abyss. It was in the middle of their fifth year that they added Caradoc Dearborn’s photograph to the little shrine that someone had started in the common room, a totem to all those that had gone on before them but would never be able to see the world which they had helped to build.

There’s a photo with James’ face there too, now. Sirius placed it himself, after the war ended, and since that time Remus has hardly been able to look at Gryffindor Tower, let alone set foot in it.

* * *

_This is the truth:_  The war was coming for them anyway.

Tom Riddle was a deadly curse, cast in Britain’s direction before any of them had been born, and his was a fire that was determined to set ablaze the whole country. It doesn’t matter who or what they were, so long as Riddle was who  _he_ was: conqueror, slaughterer, liberator.

The only way that any of them could have gotten out unscathed was to get out of the way.

* * *

The other Marauders sometimes joked that Remus was preparing to be a monk. Studious, reserved, and averse to the others’ ribald tales, it suited him but was at the same time, from wizards, a gentle admonishment:  _lighten up, or aren’t you one of us?_

Virtue, vice, and sin. There’s a House for everything, and everything to go in a House. Perhaps Slytherins are greedy, Ravenclaws proud, and Hufflepuffs full of a lust for life. Are Gryffindors wrathful, then? It would fit, from what Remus has seen.

It’s pointless to think of what-ifs and could’ve-beens. The world is exactly as it is. Riddle exists. Remus’ friends are dead or broken. And Remus…

Remus is a Gryffindor, no matter what else he might have been. And deep in his soul, down where the wolf lives and no one can tell the difference between his thoughts and its instincts, Remus  _hates_.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t tried to hide where this series was heading, but if there was any doubt then this story should give enough hints for you to have some idea about the shape of Magical Britain as we’ll find it in the 1990s.
> 
> Caradoc Dearborn is a canon character but we don’t know his age. In canon, he was a member of the Order of the Phoenix but disappeared, presumably killed. His blood status in canon is unknown, but his name seems to be common among 20th-century muggles only as Caradog, with a “g,” so he’s a half-blood here.
> 
> The sweet buns were merely non-nutritious simulacra, and hence not a true violation of the most famous Principal Exception to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration, but it was still a tricky bit of transfiguration. I would judge it to be a third-year spell, complicated but not out of reach for a quartet of wizards who would end up becoming animagi and making a mystical map before they graduated from Hogwarts.
> 
> **Credits**
> 
> The observation that Remus might have had a talent at acting comes from A Year Like None Other, by aspeninthesunlight.
> 
> The Diagonal Theatre comes from The Accidental Animagus, by White Squirrel. It is "practically owned" by Lord Ethelred Brocklehurt, head of the Culture, Media, and Sport Committee and great-grandfather of (canon character) Mandy Brocklehurst. At least, in a version of the 1990s that didn't feature a Gryffindor-sorted Voldemort.


End file.
